


a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

by zauberer_sirin



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Introspection, Mulder-centric, reverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:55:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24774250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: Reposting old X Files fic from Livejournal here, becauuse I never got around doing that, and I've been rewatching the show.This one is from April 2008.Summary: These are not all the ways and whys and hows Mulder loves Scully, just some. In reverse.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 9
Kudos: 45





	a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

**[20]**

It’s not that he is happy.

He can’t be happy, it would be immoral, because the world is going to end and everybody is going to die and okay it might be not his fault but he still feels like it is his fault. He is too used to the feeling.

So he can’t be happy, but he enjoys not having to invent any excuse to brush his shoulder against her when they pass each other and he enjoys the freedom of just grabbing her wrist and pulling her against him and burying his face between her shoulder and neck-

-and yes, Scully thinks he is becoming a bit _clingy_ , she says with a smile, the times she allows herself to smile, but he corrects her because he has always been clingy, _always been pathetic, me_ , the difference is now she lets him and,

Big mistake, he tells her when he pins her down the bed, big mistake, letting me, always been, pathetic and mmm, yes-

That’s when she makes that sound, between laughter and disapproval, because she likes being crushed by his weight, being pushed into the mattress like the bed was quicksand and she says _clingy, clingy_ until she runs her hands in his hair and says _okay, okay_.

And it almost doesn’t matter that this is a cheap motel room and not exactly romance and the world is going to end because okay, it has always been this way with him, it has always been Scully first, and then the rest.

**[19]**

Sometimes he still can’t sleep unless the tv is on.

Scully protests, of course, and one night she threw a pillow at him, and after that he muted the volume and learned to lip-read, self-taught. She still complains, because it’s not a matter of _sound, it’s the fucking bright lights_ in one of the few occasions she lets herself swear.

And one night she is half-asleep and muttering complains at the science fiction double feature going on the cable, he goes very still and pushes his face against her hair.

Sometimes I think you only stick with me because there’s no one else to go to, he says.

She doesn’t even open her eyes when she says _really, Mulder, for such an egotist you are so insecure_ and then she finds his hand under the big pile of covers –it’s winter-, _how can you-?_ , and never finishes the thought, she squeezes his hand, and _turn that damn thing off_.

And that night, he does.

**[18]**

So, end of the world, uh.

He is watching her picking up the things from the car, shoving sports bags into the room.

It’s a date.

It’s more of a date than we ever had. Except that time we went to eat ribs.

That wasn’t a date, Mulder.

It was a date. We just didn’t know it at the time.

And he doesn’t ask when she _knew_ , he has never asked, because he is a big coward and he is afraid of finding out that it wasn’t like that for her, that she didn’t record every (real or imagined) conversation in her mind, that she didn’t remember everything, that she wasn’t counting the accidental (or not) brushes of hands, fingers, the spaces between breaths, the sentences that the other finished, a list of all the times she made him smile, a list of all the times he made her smile, another list with all the times they made each other miserable and that was okay because miserable with each other was way better than happy with anyone else.

If he is alone in that, he doesn’t want to know. She already suspects he is a big, misguided pile of mush as it is and she would probably raise an eyebrow and say something patronizing, but sometimes he feels tempted to ask, sometimes he wonders who _knew first_ , although he feels like he knew from the start, which can’t be quite right and anyway he believes applying the “love at first sight” stamp would only cheapen it down, even the simple word, _love_ seems unhelpful, ludicrous, inaccurate and plain _not enough_.

He feels ordinary, everyday words can never ever apply to them because _this is Scully_ , he had meant to invent a whole new language for her.

**[17]**

When he comes back from the dead-

(he does that, _sometimes_ )

he hopes she is there, when he wakes up, and has a moment of panic imagining she _might not_ , simply because she has always been and there hasn’t been a single crisis in their lives in which, upon waking up in a strange hospital bed, the other wasn’t there to hold hands like the mere concept of fingers had just been invented.

It’s too good a tradition to break it now.

But there was nothing to worry about; he wakes up from the dead and she is there and he makes a bad joke and she smiles/cries and puts her head –heavy, wonderfully heavy and there- to his chest and Mulder grins because he knew, he _just knew it_ : he has always known, between death and _Scully_ , which one is stronger.

**[16]**

It takes him a bit to understand it –and the revelation has nothing to do with being abducted except _yes, of course_ because he is Fox Mulder and it’s only fitting that the story should end this way for him.

But then he thinks –just a moment after he understands what’s happening and just a moment before the world melts into white- he hadn’t realized how fitting it was or which story he has been telling, which story he has been living.

It’s fitting that it all should end where it started, Oregon, X marks the spot, etc, and that’s what hits him, _where it started_ , this story is not about Fox Mulder, he thinks-

-his lips curl into an _Oh_ and he agrees, he agrees wholeheartedly with the universe, he agrees a big fucking YES because he always suspected that meeting Scully was the most singular thing that had happened to him since he was born, and it had rewritten his whole physiology just like being born and well, in the end it had been much, much more important than being born.

When the thought strikes him Mulder catches himself thinking about Bob Dylan singing “get born”, catches himself thinking _Scully_ like it’s the first or the last time and he just gets it.

**[15]**

They are still holding hands –only it’s not _their_ normal handholding, not the Scully-Mulder type, the _phew, we almost died back there_ grasp they usually practice; it’s the normal kind of handholding normal people usually do and _wow, ain’t it something_ \- when she turns to ask him.

What I have always found frustrating is… well, zombies are actually really slow. How is it that they always get us? They can’t run.

Ah, Mulder puts his hand in the air. The hand’s that’s still free. It’s a question as old as time.

Well? She arches an eyebrow.

He just shrugs, Maybe they are really, really persistent.

**[14]**

They don’t talk that much more that night.

They don’t really talk about this type of thing, the important stuff. Which some might say it’s the secret of their partnership, except it’s not. They don’t say much more because Scully can read him perfectly and he doesn’t need words where she can offer hand, palm, fingers, fingertips.

There are many things Mulder doesn’t say because he thinks he can’t but this isn’t one of them.

“I’m okay,” he tells her later, which is not the same as his earlier _I’m free_ and he trusts her to know the difference.

On your own terms, she whispers quizzically when they hug. 

Mulder realizes that’s true, and he has done this because he _can_. He has let go because he finally can. His own terms. Yes, yes, he says when they break the embrace, meaning, probably, thank you.

When he repeats _I’m fine_ it’s meaning thank you, too, thank you for listening to me and listening to me listening to Sam and not caring if it was all a lie, and thank you for crying for me when I couldn’t and for thinking I deserved better, and thank you, thank you for letting me fall apart in your hands.

**[13]**

California looks good in her hair and for once there hasn’t been too many gruesome deaths, or clues to governmental conspiracies or proof of alien invasions so between that and the sun it almost feels like holidays.

He has been flirting all week. He knows it and knows he shouldn’t but he couldn’t stop it.

Well, flirting _more than usual_ , in any case.

But now he is in trouble, now he is in deep shit, because Scully is flirting _back_ at him and she knows _magic tricks_ and he is totally, utterly fucked – she looks so happy for once that it kills him in all the good and bad ways and that’s when he decides he loves California.

**[12]**

So his dreams are a bit like _The Last Temptation of Christ_.

Never mind, because his waking up is a fairytale moment when he opens his eyes and Scully is there - _of course_ \- and crying and saving him and he is horribly convinced that he is alive just because she called him back to her side.

He learned all about Greek myths in school and then all about the meaning behind them in college but now he remembers his poetry classes and how they key to metaphors is that they are, of course, real.

He wants to tell her this, this Disney moment revelation of his, but then it seems silly, because the world doesn’t work like that, and the human body sure as hell doesn’t, and she is a _scientist, for fuck’s sake_.

So he doesn’t really tell her about that.

Instead, he tries rewriting history in a hallway.

Which is kind of a recurring theme for them, now that he thinks about it.

**[11]**

Mulder is prone to epiphanies.

He blames it on a seminar on Joyce he attended when he was at Oxford (but that was the semester he spent watching Monty Python tapes and fucking Phoebe in every corner and storage room of the college so maybe he shouldn’t be too hard on poor old James).

Actually, he is prone to recurring epiphanies and no, he doesn’t think that’s a contradiction of terms at all. He just gets caught up in his own insights, even if it’s not the first time he has them.

So, what Arthur is saying, he gets it perfectly. Of course, Arthur doesn’t believe he does, which is frustrating but finally unsurprising because Mulder thinks he is very bad at explaining this sort of thing –he thinks, secretly, this is why he has never tried to talk to Scully _properly_.

But he gets it. Baseball and the transforming power of love. He thinks about Scully and that’s an epiphany. It doesn’t matter that’s one he has _every day_.

And that’s why he spends the next couple of hours stealing touches from Scully and not quite teaching her to hit the ball, and the next couple of hours after that smiling while she looks happy and confused, sat across her in a diner that shouldn’t be open so late but Mulder guesses that love stories can never quite fit to opening hours.

**[10]**

He is not brave enough to ask if she remembers.

In the flight back from Antarctica he looks at the corner of her mouth and for a moment he looks as if he is going to ask and Scully looks at him, _what?_ like she is worried and then he is absolutely sure she doesn’t remember what happened outside his apartment, _what was about to happen_ , what he said to her.

Not for the first time Mulder thinks the universe is set on playing cruel jokes at his expense; but then he looks at her, frostbite on her cheeks and sore lips and alive and in the end he decides he doesn’t have much to complain about this time.

**[9]**

He brings her cheap hospital ice cream afterwards, the kind you are supposed to eat when you have a sore throat, weirdly, and says _been waiting until I saw your brother leave_ with a shy smirk and it almost makes her smile, except it doesn’t because-

 _sorry, he’s a bit of a jerk_ but Mulder shakes his head, no, no, he is alright, he is more than alright, families are great and he thinks it’s good that Scully has people who love her fiercely, if only because she should.

They make small talk and he ends up stealing half her ice cream, sharing her spoon, which is _so unhygienic_ she tells him, chuckling.

Why am I not dead? She asks, and it doesn’t sound regretful or even deep, just matter-of-factly.

Mulder huffs. Whatever you want to believe is fine with me.

He hopes Scully can tell he means it. Because he goes on and on about _the truth_ but some days there are more important things. Today qualifies.

Science or God, she starts.

Mmph.

Science or God or- It’s always been like that.

It’s an old battle for some. Science or God. I guess you’ll just have to decide for yourself, Scully.

She gives him a strange, soft look.

Science and God. She adds: And of course I’ll have to make room for _Mulder_ in there.

**[8]**

He is a complete failure.

He doesn’t even have the nerve to admit he bought her flowers, even now that she is going to die, _totally and completely, utterly going to die_ , and he makes up some silly story about stealing them. 

He can’t even do _flowers_ right, for fuck’s sake.

He confesses of course, later on, with his hands in his pockets when she is out of her hospital gown already and looking reasonably fine and brave and resolved.

About the flowers. I didn’t-

I know, Mulder.

Oh. _Oh_. Yes, right, okay, but- he laughs a bit hysterically, taking his hands out of his pockets and burying his head in them. I’m an asshole.

Well, maybe, but that’s not the subject of this investigation, Agent Mulder, she says, giving him a soft shove with her shoulder and Mulder is very glad that, among the other million things Scully is to him, she is his best friend.

And that’s when he starts mumbling like a madman: things like _you shouldn’t have to_ and _many things you should never have_ and _shouldn’t need to know_ and, over and over, _never for me, not for me_ and many other things that, Thank God, Scully can’t hear.

Now, now, her voice sounds like a schoolteacher’s. You wanna keep on with that and invalidate everything I’ve learned these past years?

And of course he wants. If that means she is going to be fine.

He grabs her wrist. He smiles up at her, showing his teeth like a desperate wolf.

I wish I had told you to go to hell after we came back from Oregon.

Do you really?

And he is weak, he can’t do even this properly, because suddenly he finds himself staring at her very intently and saying in a soft, low, barely audible voice, _No. No, no._

Good, Scully says simply, putting him back together.

**[7]**

He once read that orphaned children like “Alice in Wonderland” more than children with living and present parents do.

He can’t remember the conclusion of that study and he is still too much of a psychologist to ignore that fact doesn’t say anything about him, really, but he is also too much of a poet not to believe that it actually does, in a way.

He has always been an orphan. An orphan with parents, that doesn’t make it any less lonely, just noisier. Though he can’t quite remember if he was an orphan before Sam disappeared.

Were you ready to put her to rest? Scully asks.

Maybe, he replies. And he thinks _yes, maybe_ and _wow_ , it’s a bit of a big step, that, and he can’t (doesn’t want to) pretend the change has nothing to do with Scully.

Sorry you missed the chance, she tells him, she looks pained. More than he feels, like she really wanted this _for him_ , and Mulder wants to comfort her, ha ha, he wants to tell her that maybe someday, that he’ll be ready again, as long as she is there to pick him up because it’s going to hurt.

There were more important things, he says and he can almost hear the little girl counting out loud, the bus, and all the blood and yes, for a moment he felt hopeless but it was the only choice he could live with.

You are a good man, Mulder, she says, like the thought had just occurred to her. It makes him smile a bit. Well, he has always wanted to think he is a good man but until now he has never had anyone actually believing him about it.

He still feels like an orphan, but he no longer feels alone.

**[6]**

Just after he almost kills her and he almost kills himself and he almost kills Robert Modell he decides that maybe this time it’s too many “almost” and too many “killing” because when she takes his hand afterwards it’s the closest Mulder has ever been to shoving her into the nearest empty room that has a lock on the door and fucking her senseless.

And good intentions be damned.

That night it’s the closest he gets to sending to hell all those excuses and the carefully constructed fictions of _I shouldn’t, we shouldn’t_ and _she wouldn’t, she doesn’t_ ; this is the closest he’s ever been to erasing all the stubbornly drawn lines in the sand and the closest he’s ever been to throwing away years and years of self-preservation instinct and guilt and longing, years and years of _I’m going to break her like I break everyone else_.

Because she is alive, now, here, she is alive but she could have _not been_ easily, because of him. She is alive and Mulder needs to know she is alive, he wants to taste the pulse in her veins on his tongue and he wants to push her against a wall and press himself to her so tightly that he can feel each breath in his own chest.

He does nothing of the sort, rationality and fear kicking in soon (but not soon enough, _fuck, fuck, fuck_ ) and when the moment passes he snatches his hand from under hers and insists on going home, walking away.

She asks if he is okay, which is bordering on the idiotic for such a smart person as Scully, because no, no, NO, but he says _yes, of course, totally_ , he waves her off.

Then she makes a movement like she is about to take his hand again and he recoils as if struck by lightning. Scully makes a little pained gesture but he can just about live with that, as long as she doesn’t touch him right now again because this is one of those times (and Mulder has watched how those moments have grown so often and near that they are practically his whole life now) when he cannot afford to touch Scully for the fear he might never stop.

**[5]**

He asks if they have ice cream, a joke, of course, cause look at the state of him but she acts as if he is being serious and she kind of lets go of his hand and starts getting up to go find out.

He shakes his head. Don’t I get cable in this room?

She is all big eyes and mouth and _oh my god Mulder are you serious? Do you know where we are? This is like the end of the world_ and he laughs at her, _I’m going to kill you, Mulder, I’m so going to kill you now_ , it kind of hurts to laugh but _come on, if you were going to kill me you’d have just let me die there in the snow_ ; _no, no, no, you are wrong, you are so very wrong, I saved your sorry ass so that I could kill you myself_ , she is so young and loud and beautiful and all in all, Mulder is pretty happy to be alive, and he didn’t think he would be.

And that’s when he remembers that he has to thoroughly explain to his parents that Sam wasn’t Sam but she was a clone, there were many of them - _yeah, I don’t get it that well myself_ -, but it doesn’t worry him too much, because, if marginally, it is a better conversation than “Mmm, Mom, Dad, remember my sister? Your daughter who disappeared? The one I’ve spent my whole life searching for? Yeah, found her, but I kind of traded her life for that of the woman who _works with me_ , sorry” had been.

Yeah, he decides, alien conspiracies and genetic experiments sound like a much better excuse than _but it’s Scully_.

**[4]**

They are all wrong.

They are wrong, wrong, wrong, fucking wrong and they just don’t get it. They don’t get him.

And what’s worse, they don’t get _him and Scully_.

Mulder thinks he has never hated somebody as much in his whole life as he hates Melissa when she suggests he doesn’t want Scully disconnected because he feels guilty. That he doesn’t want her to die just because he feels guilty.

No, he wanted to scream at the top of his lungs. You don’t get it! I don’t want her to die because I don’t want her to die!

Sure, he feels guilty, and if Scully dies the guilt would become sort of permanent, but if Scully dies, he wants to tell the world, guilt will be the least of his concerns.

Sure, he is desperately trying to find a way to save her. But not because he feels guilty for what happened to her. (although it is his fault, he keeps repeating to himself, he never lets himself forget it) It’s so much simpler than all that. It’s so hugely simple that everybody keeps missing it. 

He just doesn’t want her to die.

And he doesn’t want her to die because he wants her to be alive and well and by his side and fighting him all the steps of the way and making him mad by never agreeing with him and making him proud with that too and telling him he is crazy but listening anyway and getting his sense of humour and _getting him_ and basically being Scully.

So he agrees with everyone else saying that he wants Scully alive because he is a selfish bastard, but nobody seems to get exactly why.

**[3]**

The first day off he has after the case –and they deserve the time off, after Tooms god knows they are entitled to- he decides to go and clean the car because he vaguely remember Scully saying what a mess it was.

He finds the empty glasses of beer and they make him chuckle.

_Fuck fate_ , he thinks. For a moment. For the briefest moment.

He comes to his senses immediately –he remembers it’s too late, she is too important and he is a bigger mess than his car.

But for a moment there he thinks…

**[2]**

This is the first time he acknowledges he has been lying to himself, for months now, not the first time in his life he suspects he might be crazy, and one of those occasions when he is sure he is a very sick man.

In retrospect he will not say that this is when he realizes he is in love with her –years later, he will still have no idea when that particular light was switched on- but maybe the first time he realizes he is probably going to be, sooner rather than later.

And it’s probably the first time in his life Fox Mulder realizes there’s a big difference between wanting someone and needing someone and Scully covers both. Which is the same as saying _fuck, I’m fucked_ and Mulder is far too self-aware to ignore the mess.

He has done it again, he decides. He has fucked things again. Like he knew he would. And this time, things were going so well. Alarmingly well, because she was smart and fierce and she believed in him and worse, he believed in her and when he introduced her to people as his _partner_ he felt like he had never understood what the word meant until now.

And now it’s all gone to hell because here they are, in the middle of the frozen nowhere, and everybody is about to turn into sociopaths and kill each other and he has as much as put his hands on her neck and-

- _boom_ -

-everything blown to pieces, months of denial and _not my type_ and _the first friend you’ve had in years, don’t fuck it up_ gone in a heartbeat because all he wants to do right now it put his mouth to the back of her neck and possibly never ever stop touching her.

Which takes him to the next point, the point in which he is a sick bastard because this is Antarctica and there’s a brain sucking worm waiting to get him outside and here he is thinking about… what? He is such a pervert.

(okay, maybe not brain-sucking, possibly spine-sucking but it gets the point across)

(he is dehydrated and his lips are sore and he is over-sensitive to light and his shirt is rubbing against his in an uncomfortable way and he is paranoid and he has been betrayed - _you pulled a gun on me_ \- and he is turned on by this all the same; surely, there must be clinics for people like him)

He is kind of disappointed afterwards, when they get out of place alive and mostly in one piece –they walked out of that room, _together_ -, because that means now he is going to have to deal with the knowledge (of what he is, of what he wants, of what she _means_ ), probably for the rest of his life. Or until she has the good sense of walking away. Which he’d say should be sooner than _the rest of his life_ but in his line of work he wouldn’t bet on that either.

**[1]**

He concludes that, because he saw her laughing, _with him_ , in a graveyard, and because she is smart and her intentions are possibly good, but mainly because she laughed in a graveyard he is going to let her stay a little longer, maybe a week, before kicking her spying ass back upstairs.

Chances are she quits even before that, Mulder reflects with more bitterness than he expected.

When he gets home that night and turns the tv on there’s some commercial about toothpaste telling him that-

-“this is the first day of your life”.

Mulder snorts.

_Yeah, right, as if._

But that night, coming back from Oregon, it’s the _less alone_ he’s felt in years.


End file.
